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103

I was going to ask “Where’s Marvin?” but I realized I don’t really care where Marvin is

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Hi and Lois, 9/22/18

Ha ha, there’s nothing that says “I love my son” like telling your wife as she walks by, completely within his earshot, “Look, I’m sitting right next to him here on the couch! You were wrong when you said I didn’t love him!” But really, the big shoutout in this strip has to go to Chip, who’s alternating between looking at his phone and reading that magazine he has draped over the arm of the couch. He doesn’t want to be there any more than Hi does!

Spider-Man, 9/22/18

J. Jonah Jameson of course discarded the traditional obituary section years ago, merging it with the wedding announcements to create a weekly “Life Moments” supplement that you have to pay to be featured in. But I assume that if Spider-Man died from some combination of being shot multiple times and suffocating from poison gas, it’d be a gleeful banner headline, for what’s that’s worth.

Marvin, 9/22/18

“Since American suburbia is bereft of truly public spaces, I thought we were going to wander around this commercial center merely for the purpose of experiencing the slow passage of time towards our inevitable and meaningless deaths in a location other than our home, for once. But you entered a series of stores with the intention of exchanging money for goods! What a twist!”

174

Sunday is for squares

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Mark Trail, 9/9/18

Remember a few years back when Mark’s ranger pal discovered some miscreants growing pot on government land, which led to an adventure at the conclusion of which Mark bludgeoned one marijuana grower with a stick and set a vicious dog on another, then left them to die of exposure and warned Rusty that some of his little friends were probably drug fiends, too? Anyway, now it’s 2018 and in lots of places weed is basically legal, which probably really cheeses Mark off, and so he’s bringing out the big guns: sure marijuana is a relatively mild intoxicant whose effects carry no more health or social risk than wholly legal alcohol, but did you know that it’s a danger to these adorable furry critters???? Remember, when large-scale industrial agriculture intrudes on natural habitat, the main thing to focus on is what’s being grown on those farms. Think before you toke, hippies!

Beetle Bailey, 9/9/18

Golf is of course beloved by people of a certain age and social position in the United States, and the fact that those positions have traditionally overlapped with newspaper comics creators has been well reflected in the strips. Still, times are changing, and I guess I have to grudgingly respect that Beetle Bailey recognizes this and has chosen to make a well-reasoned case for the game in the marketplace of ideas rather than just assuming that everyone immediately sees its charms.

Marvin, 9/9/18

Marvin, meanwhile, just uses golf as an excuse for a terrible bit of wordplay that honestly could’ve run in a three-panel daily strip but has been inflicted on us on this, the Lord’s day, in what is surely a sin deserving of eternal damnation.

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One-panel Friday

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The Phantom, 8/24/18

So the Phantom’s daughter Heloise has been locked in a battle of wits with her father’s arch-enemy, the Nomad, and it is not going well for her! The Nomad slipped some bogus info to the TSA at the airport where he stashes his private plane to arrange this little interrogation, and I have to say that I find it both hilarious and terrifyingly plausible that some TSA guys would say, “This random guy we’ve never met tells us he’s overheard a teenage girl saying that terrorists … are good??? Set the entire country’s threat level to orange and get ready for a seven-hour interrogation!”

Six Chix, 8/24/18

I’ve noticed that several recent Six Chix strips set in a therapist’s office have included a discreet box of tissues located near the patient’s couch, which I think is a nice bit of verisimilitude. At least it’s something to cling onto here, where we otherwise have to try to figure out whether this hippo (?) is, like … hovering over the bird, or crushing it, or if they’re both on the couch, or what.

Marvin, 8/24/18

“Five! Five is exactly the right number of coffee shops for a city to have.”